BBC National Orchestra & Chorus of Wales & Adrian Partington - Stanford: Te Deum & Elegiac Ode (2024) [Digital Download 24/96]

By the time Stanford received a commission from the Norfolk and Norwich Festival to write a choral work for them in 1884, he had, at the age of 32, already begun to assert himself as one of Britain’s leading composers. The Elegiac Ode was, however, his first mature foray into the world of major British choral festivals. Some of the Elegiac Ode had in fact been sketched three years earlier in 1881, but after the Norwich commission was received, Stanford evidently grasped the opportunity to complete the work in its entirety in July 1884. The words were taken from the last part of Whitman’s elegy, ‘When lilacs in the dooryard bloom’d’, written in the aftermath of President Lincoln’s assassination in 1865 (it was a text which Stanford’s pupil, Holst, later used for his Ode to Death, composed in the wake of the war in 1919). Taking the seven verses of the burial hymn, Stanford divided his chosen text into four parts, thereby creating a four-movement musical structure more akin to a choral symphony with its substantial (and thematically related) choral outer movements flanking two shorter inner essays. Stanford’s large-scale setting of the Te Deum Op. 66 was first sung at the Leeds Festival on 6 October 1898 and its ambitious, opulent dimensions were clearly intended to be a fitting commemoration of the accession to the throne of Queen Victoria (its dedicatee) sixty years earlier as well as a tribute to the full-bodied, well-trained Leeds chorus of 350 singers. A particular feature of the Te Deum is the grandeur of much of its choral writing. Though also dramatic in its impact, a dominating feature of the Te Deum is its prominent use of the chorus, and the many fulsome sonorities Stanford was able to draw from the magnificent ‘instrument’ of the Leeds voices.

Tracklist:
01. Stanford- Te Deum, Op. 66- I. No. 1 Te deum laudamus - Andante maestoso - Allegro moderato (all breve)
02. Stanford- Te Deum, Op. 66- II. No. 2 Tu rex gloriae - Larghetto
03. Stanford- Te Deum, Op. 66- III. No. 3 Judex crederis - Allegro energico
04. Stanford- Te Deum, Op. 66- IV. No. 4 Per singles dies - Larghetto - Andante con moto tranquillo
05. Stanford- Te Deum, Op. 66- V. No. 5 Miserere nostril - Adagio
06. Stanford- Te Deum, Op. 66- VI. No. 6 In te, Domine speravi - Allegro maestoso - Tranquillando - Andante Maestoso
07. Stanford- Elegiac Ode, Op. 21- I. No. 1 Come, lovely and smoothing Death - Lento Allegro Maestoso
08. Stanford- Elegiac Ode, Op. 21- II. No. 2 Dark Mother, always gliding near - Allegretto con moto
09. Stanford- Elegiac Ode, Op. 21- III. No. 3 From me to thee glad serenades - L'istesso Tempo
10. Stanford- Elegiac Ode, Op. 21 IV. No. 4 The night is silence - Tranquillo - Allegretto maestoso con moto - Adagio


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